It happens when John is finally working toward being all right.
There, in John's bed. Light ginger waves and too-sharp cheekbones.
It is the lips that do him in.
"Sh-Sher-?" John hears distantly.
The Man's eyes flutter open, and they are immediately the right colour that does not have a description.
"Sherlock?" John chokes again.
John is afraid to move, afraid the Man will dissolve on the bed like heroin on a spoon.
"John," comes the voice, rough like never sleeping.
John has moved to the bed without feeling his body at all. His hand is suspended motionless, inches from the face and though it is dirty, it is the face.
"John," Sherlock says again.
John reaches for him and clutches him with his eyes wide open just in case. He smells fear and triumph and feels his own heartbeat in his fingertips as they brush through the fine dark hairs growing in at the base of Sherlock's neck.
"If I say anything it'll just come out stupid," John says finally.
"I'd expect nothing else," Sherlock replies with just the whisper of a laugh, and then John is giggling hysterically and they are clutching each other in John's bed, laughing, and it is not at all the way John imagined it.
A few seconds later his anger rushes over him and he yanks Sherlock out of his bed and into the loo, makes him sit on the edge of the bathtub, and checks him over for injuries. Sherlock hisses when John swabs alcohol over a particularly fresh cut on his eyebrow, and John takes perverse pleasure both in the pain itself and in the fact that it means Sherlock is...
"You're alive," John says.
Sherlock says nothing, just looks up at him, and he is suddenly very thin.
Fuck it.
John pulls his friend close. Sherlock's warm, living arms come around John's body. Sherlock's heart beats against John's fingertips.
John lets his eyes close and just breathes.
A/N: Reviews - positive and negative - are food. Feed the writer, please! :)
